Last summer, in July, I had the opportunity get involved in the archaeological project led by Prof Fernando Quesada Sanz (Head of the Prehistory and Archaeology Department at Universidad Autonóma de Madrid), taking place at the site located at Cerro de la Merced, in Cabra, province of Córdoba, Spain.

Cerro de la Merced is an Iberian settlement dating to ca. 100 BC, with a double fortification composed of cyclopean walls (built with massive irregular blocks) connected by a monumental stone staircase. It’s being interpreted as a local aristocratic centre developed during the Romanisation of the southern of the Iberian Peninsula. It isn’t thought that it had a military function, though, due to, among other things, its lack of visual control over the surrounding area. The interior includes ten rooms, of which walls of up to four metres have been preserved.

It was my first time participating in an archaeological season which consisted exclusively of post-excavation work and I soon realised that this work progresses slower than excavation. It’s said that each day of fieldwork at the site requires three days of post-excavation/ lab work. The good thing about the nature of this work is that it’s quite varied. It might involve cleaning pottery with a toothbrush and a bucket of water, labelling and cataloguing finds, working out the stratigraphy of the site (analysis of the layers of soil and archaeological remains), or restoring artefacts in fragile conditions among many others (the former two tend to be carried out in parallel to the excavation). In this case, I ended up participating in the drawing and inventorying tasks. This experience definitely gave me a wider and more holistic picture of what archaeology actually involves. It isn’t all about digging up stuff!

I also worked with the finds database, created using FileMaker, making records for each individual find (have in mind that excavation had taken place for four seasons and thousands of artefacts had been recovered), and taking photographs of the finds which didn’t have one yet. This database will then be able to be cross-compared with the materials and stratigraphic units databases to get a more complete picture of the site, which will facilitate its analysis and help the team obtain more accurate interpretations.

I also got the chance to learn how to draw identifiable pottery remains (bases, rims, and handles), as well as metal artefacts. Pottery tends to be recovered in a very fragmentary state so before drawing a fragment, similar remains are looked for in all the bags of the same stratigraphic unit (layer) and surrounding units. The fragments belonging to the same vessels are provisionally glued together (the glue will later be removed by the conservator and be properly restored), and drawn in a 1:1 scale. The drawings are then digitised to include some of them in publications. Through these drawings the shape and size of the pots can be known with great exactitude and different typologies (classification according to variations from a general type) can be created.

The work was a great and productive experience and I can’t wait to visit the site once it is musealised!

This is just a quick post to make official the start of the blog, which is aimed for everyone: archaeologists, students, and anyone who is remotely curious about archaeology.

I hope for Past for the Present to be a place where everyone can feel free to express their opinions about archaeological topics. If you’d like specific topics to be discussed, just drop me a message; I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Hope you enjoy reading Past for the Present!

*Thanks to my friend Ana Vasco for the logo she has created for Past for the Present. You can follow her incredible work on her Instagram account!